Wagner James Au reports on virtual worlds & VR

Tuesday, April 03, 2018

Watch Here Live at 4pm PST: VR Pioneer Jaron Lanier Appears in Sinespace UPDATE: Interview to Be Rescheduled Due to Technical Issues

UPDATE, 4:45: Ironically befitting an interview for a book about the rocky beginnings of VR, we experienced some technical glitches with Jaron's machine, and will need to reschedule the appearance. Apologies to everyone who attended, and thanks to Jaron's staff at Microsoft who worked heroically to get his PC in order and helped with the logistics. We will try this again soon!

If you're unable to join us in Sinespace at 4:00pm PST today for Jaron Lanier's book interview, you can watch the live video stream I'll add here (if all goes as planned) around that time. Just refresh the page around that time!

This is gameplay from Moondust, Jaron Lanier's groundbreaking videogame from 1982, generally considered one of the first interactive art games. Here's how Jaron describes it in Dawn:

The gameplay was bizarre. You influenced a whole swarm of spaceships at once to try to get them to smear a flowing ribbon of color into a ghostly, shimmering target, which would undulate orgasmically if you succeeded. The gameplay was too complex to approach analytically. One had to become intuitive, and then there was the oddly sexual quality.

Moondust was also an unlikely hit, earning Jaron some decent royalty checks which he plowed into the funding of his startup VPL Research (for "Virtual Programming Languages") which in 1984, became the first VR startup. Here's video of Jaron in the early 90s demonstrating a couple of their VR devices outside the VPL office, which was located on the old marina in Redwood City (some employees, Jaron writes, literally lived near and commuted to work by boat):

Finally (and much more recently, i.e. a few months ago), here's Jaron talking about Dawn with the New York Times' Maureen Dowd: